Waliullah Rahmani and Steven Butler
Waliullah Rahmani is an Asia researcher with CPJ. From 2016 to the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021, he was founder and director of Khabarnama Media, one of Afghanistan's first digital media organizations; he has also worked as a government adviser and researcher in Afghanistan.
Asia program coordinator Steven Butler lived and worked in Asia as a foreign correspondent for nearly 20 years, and later was Foreign Editor at the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau. He holds a PhD in political science from Columbia University.
Afghanistan’s intelligence agency emerges as new threat to independent media
On January 19, the Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI) publicly called on Afghan media to refrain from publishing and broadcasting what it termed “false news and baseless rumors.” The warning amounted to the first public acknowledgement of something that Afghan journalists already knew: a tough new cop was on the beat. The emergence of…